How can you use your IT expertise to drive digital transformation?

Couple of pointers to make the process easier: - Define IT's role in achieving business strategies - Set mutually understandable goals for IT and business teams - Prioritize IT projects that offer strategic value - Ensure IT and business communication is frequent and clear, get to know each other and spend time together - I can't stress it enough how important that is! - Make sure that IT is involved in business discussions - Measure IT's impact on business outcomes regularly, this makes IT visible IT should be an equal party in both good and bad, by talking to people and being there for the whole organisation you can make it happen

In the context of digital transformation, alignment of IT with business goals is crucial for success. Before making any changes you would need to make clear what are the specific goals and particularities of the business you serve. For now, Digitial Transformation has become a quite wide term and you need to make sure that the methods and frameworks you picked fit the purpose best way. Put your eyesight on the ways of communication with clients and partners, internal processes, and the level of uncertainty in the environment your company works. The more ambiguous environments require more flexible and experiment-based approaches, while the determined ones lean towards strict processes and rules.

Fourth way to empower and ensure the success of digital transformation is development of digital skills and modern IT frameworks. All the unknown terrify people, so the can stay against of initiatives. On the flip side, when people are engages with the new technologies and have required skills to utilize them, they more willing to adapt and advocate for them. So, commonly available trainings and seminars are the good option to foster your early adopters across the company.

Also makes sense to collaborate and partner with other counterparts to test and explore new features. The first reason is that you won't be thrown solitudely to tackle with new approaches. Some risks will be shared. Second, when you build some guild or cooperative with a common goal, and you will get the constructional criticism on the approaches and be able to benchmark achieved metrics against others. As the African proverb tells us, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Metrics are inevitable if anybody plans to conrol some subject. Products, services, processes - whatever, require metrics. Otherwise you won't be able to assess and measure the given outcomes of you changes. It's very dangerous to be blinded by the process of transformation itself and ignore potentially negative impact. Or, in the opposite - prove the results to management board of applied efforts and expenses, without reliable data.